Many influential Enlightenment thinkers did in fact claim that some of their ideas on the subject were directly taken from Native American sources – even though, predictably, intellectual historians today insist this cannot really be the case. Indigenous people are assumed to have lived in a completely different universe, inhabited a different reality, even; anything Europeans said about them was simply a shadow-play projection, fantasies of the ‘noble savage’ culled from the European tradition itself.4
